1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to network communications and more particularly to redundancy of the routing protocol Intermediate System to Intermediate System Intra-domain Routing Information Exchange (“IS-IS”) and apparatus for protecting protocol services of a router and neighbor routers from failure within the router.
2. Related Art
Data packets progress through data networks by being sent from one machine to another towards their destination. Routers or other types of switches are used to route the data packets over one or more links between a data source, such as a customer's computer connected to the data network, and a destination. Routing protocols such as Intermediate System to Intermediate System Intra-domain Routing Information Exchange Protocol (“IS-IS”), Border Gateway Protocols (“BGP”), Routing Information Protocol (“RIP”), and Open Shortest Path First Protocol (“OSPF”) enable each machine to understand which other machine is the “next hop” that a packet should take towards its destination. Routers use the routing protocols to construct routing tables. Thereafter, when a router receives a data packet and has to make a forwarding decision, the router “looks up” the next hop machine in the routing table. Conventionally, the routers look up the routing table using the destination IP address in the data packet as an index.
IS-IS is a link state protocol which stores information about the state of links and uses that data to select paths. IS-IS is defined by the International Standard Organization as described in ANS1 X353.3/87-150R, 1987 and RFC-1074, which references are incorporated by references into this application. IS-IS specifies two level hierarchical routing in which Level 1 routing deals with routing within an area and Level 2 routing deals with routing between different areas. Each node maintains a complete topology of the whole network. Route computation is based on a modified version of Dijkstra's Shortest Path First (SPF) algorithm. A process referred to as configuration defines how routers learn about each other.
When conventional IP edge routers lose their primary circuitry and operation falls back to a redundant controller, a five to fifteen minute outage ensues while the router relearns the routing states and packet forwarding tables. In order to enhance the reliability of the router device, it is important to multiplex the above-mentioned route calculation units. The multiplex router device includes a plurality of route calculation units, and always has one route calculation unit placed in the active mode to make it execute an ordinary process while keeping the remaining route calculation units in a standby mode. When the route calculation unit in the active mode runs into trouble, the multiplex router device brings one of the waiting route calculation units into the active mode (this is referred to as a system switchover of route calculation units), and the one other route calculation unit takes over and continues to execute the process that was previously being executed by the route calculation unit in trouble.
It is desirable to provide high network availability by providing improved redundancy which can be implemented as a link level protocol running over IP having a backup link level process in total real time synchronization with an active one in order to enable an expeditious switchover when a failure occurs on the active control card.